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An Irish mobile gaming company is claiming to be the first to offer gambling services via MMS.
Dublin-based Speirtech said that its recent demonstration with Logica of interactive casino games on mobile handsets was the first time this has been achieved in the MMS arena.
The mobile gaming demonstration was performed using Logica's MMSC's mobile application interface and Speirtech's MGP (Mobile Gaming Platform). According to the two companies, this joint initiative produced an application that gives mobile or gaming/casino operators the ability to offer interactive gambling games such as fruit machines and roulette in colour with animated graphics and sound.
For instance, users can spin the reels of a fruit machine using SMS or MMS. The MGP then delivers the result of the reel spin to the user's phone in MMS format. According to Speirtech, the multimedia message plays like a PowerPoint presentation, informing the user of their bets, using animated graphics to spin the reels on screen and finally providing the user with a game result.
Brian Loughnane, head of software development at Speirtech, told ElectricNews.Net that the company is confident the system will entice on-line gamblers to MMS. "Gambling has been one of the main money makers on the Internet and this has shown that people are prepared to gamble in a multimedia environment," said Loughnane.
This would appear to be backed up by recent research. Irish wireless consultancy, Alatto, has said that it expects mobile gambling to worth at least EUR700 million worldwide by 2006 and to provide a lucrative niche revenue stream for mobile operators.
"It opens up the gambling market for operators to people who probably don't have access to the fixed Internet or may not have a credit card," said John Whelan, head of research at Alatto. "In addition, we are increasingly seeing that more people, particularly in Southern Europe, have access to mobiles than they do to the Internet."
MMS-enabled phones and networks are slowly becoming available in Europe and Speirtech said that although a release date for the system had not been set, it was in talks with several interested parties.
Founded in 2000, Speirtech has developed a platform that enables operators to offer games over MMS, WML (Wap), cHTML (I-mode) and HTML (PDAs). It has been privately funded to date by its management team of Loughnane, Managing Director Paul Savage and Technical Director Phil Smy.
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